From the “Where are they now?” files, an undocumented paperback version of the classic newspaper typeface.

The deepest rabbit holes of type research often open up from a simple font identification request. I fell into one of these on Thursday when David Corti of September Industry sent me the image at right. It presented one of those troublesome ID challenges: type that feels so familiar but every guess is slightly off. I immediately thought of Times, but the details here are sharper (‘S’), more dramatic (‘E’), with wedge-like serifs. The whole thing is more narrow than Times, with stronger contrast, indicating that this is a variation designed specifically for display use. After online sources failed me, I went to the big yellow book. And there it was: Times Modern.

Times Modern compared to condensed and extra bold styles of Times. Besides its compact stature and sharp details, Times Modern also differs in its angled terminals on the stems of letters like ‘b’, ‘h’, ‘n’ and, most strangely, the bottom of the ‘u’.

The reason this thing was so tough to locate is that it is a font that was available digitally for years, but then silently yanked from the market, and thus the web — meeting the same fate as fonts like Haas Unica and ITC Didi. Complicating research even further, there are multiple designs known as “Times Modern”. Most articles we find today refer to the typeface designed by Luke Prowse and Neville Brody in 2006 for a redesign of The Times of London. And later, Eduardo Manso created Sunday Times Modern, an unrelated family for The Sunday Times.

This Times Modern, on the other hand, is a pre-digital design (published digitally by Scangraphic, then Elsner+Flake as “SH Times Modern” or “EF Times Modern”). But it’s unclear just how old it is. The history of Times New Roman is, of course, a very long and thorny one, and there’s no need to go into that here. Suffice it to say, this Times Modern appears to me to be entirely separate from Times or Times New Roman. My guess is that it was produced in the 1960s or ’70s, as it has the flavor of those off-kilter, high contrast headliners of the phototype era. Those who mourn the disappearance of EF Times Modern can still find like-minded eccentricities in type like Denver, ITC Grouch, Grumpy, Caslon Graphique, Benguiat Caslon, Cabernet, Troover Roman, Hawthorn, the new Superior Title, and more.

Willy Fleckhaus’ 1970s covers from Suhrkamp’s Taschenbuch Wissenschaft (science paperback) series. Umlauts are placed to the side of capital letters to accommodate the tight linespacing.

Perhaps Times Modern’s origins can be traced back to its most iconic use: the taschenbuch (paperback) series from German publisher Suhrkamp. Simple and striking, the covers stick to a strict template of tightly spaced Times Modern Black in just two sizes centered at the top. The title and author are large; the subtitle and imprint immediately follow in smaller type on the next line.

The system was developed by legendary German designer Willy Fleckhaus and Rolf Staudt, beginning in 1971. Somereports claim that the designers developed this customization of Times themselves for these covers. But Carsten Wolff, co-author of a 1997 Fleckhaus monograph, disputes that, telling us that Fleckhaus used classic phototype faces originating from suppliers like Linotype, Stempel, and Bauer, and did not design his own.

The 1001 years of yearning (2002). Suhrkamp maintained the paperback identity for over 30 years, but it got watered down over time, with looser type and full-bleed imagery.

Another departure, this special edition of Amerika (1997) got foil stamped type. Still, the template was more or less intact until about ten years ago when Suhrkamp replaced the Fleckhaus system with a new design using banal left aligned type and four color blocks. Sad.

Fleckhaus also used this face (or one very much like it) even before, for his work at Twen, a sexy magazine for “people in their twenties, from 15 to 30”. The cover below suggests that the font existed as early as 1970.

Younger folks may recognize Times Modern from the original logo of Acne Jeans. The Swedish clothing label modified the face slightly, giving its ‘A’ a hefty top serif à la Caslon Graphique. They have since evolved into a bolder, more polished logotype.

I am still quite curious to know more about the origins of this typeface. Did Fleckhaus really create it? Did it debut with only this “Black” weight? I did find two weights of a very similar typeface in a 1980 phototype catalog. The design, called “Times Bold Modified”, is not as condensed but has many of the same unusual details — with the addition of some goofy swash add-ons that were so prevalent in fonts at the time.

I also wonder why EF Times Modern is no longer available from Elsner+Flake. My hunch is that Monotype, the trademark owner of the “Times” typefaces, revoked their right to sell it, but that’s only speculation. I have some emails out to Elsner+Flake and people who worked with the foundry when the font was still available. I’ll update this article if and when I hear back. Failing that, I’m relying on you, dear readers, to shed some light on this mystery.

Update: Elsner+Flake wrote to say the removal of their font from the market is due to a complaint from Times Newspaper Ltd. who claimed that the name was too close to Times Classic and Times Millennium. Sigh.

Update, Mar 18, 2013: I contacted Albert-Jan Pool, who worked at Scangraphic from 1987–91. He did not remember Times Modern and didn’t find it in his catalogs. But adds this:

Brendel Informatik [now TypeShop Collection] (Walter Brendel used to be customer of Peter Karow at an early stage of the development of Ikarus, part of their data were in some of the more obscure IK archives of URW) seems to have had some kind of “Times Serial” called Riccione with 7 weights. Maybe E&F derived Times Modern from there by generating a condensed version of the bold weight?

Indeed, the bold weights of TS Riccione do come closer to Times Modern than anything I’ve seen in digital form (besides E+F’s now unavailable version). Riccione is clearly a different design, though — more cleanly drawn, with balanced counters. This can be a great thing for users, and the XBold is particularly nice, but it does miss the compressed wackiness of Times Modern if that’s what you’re seeking.

Artwork location

In Sets

22 Comments on
“The Other Times Modern”

For the Acne Jeans logo, there’s a very good chance that the A wasn’t modified for that one logo, but was simply an alternate form that was offered with the font. This definitely wouldn’t have been out of the ordinary for a face with its origins in phototype.

Photo-Lettering had a face similar to this called Bartuska Modern Times as far back as 1964, probably earlier. VGC lists two similar faces called Times Bold Modified No. 1 and No. 2 in their 1973 catalog. Headliners also had one called (what else?) neo-Times Roman that had bold weights that were similar. (The version with flat serifs they called neo-Times English.) Alphabet Innovations had one called Times Text in 1972. There were probably others, and I suspect it was a phototype display thing mostly.

One thing they all have in common is the idea of “fixing” the inconsistent handling of details between Times Roman (or Times New Roman) and Times Bold. None of the interpretations were exactly the same, but they were all the same idea. EF Times Modern seems to be the only digital example.

Thanks for the comment, Mark. You certainly identify what ties these type designs together. It looks like they were an attempt to add weight to the regular style of Times without changing the details (such as the angled stem serifs). I mentioned Times Bold Modified in the piece, and I’ll add that scan below just so it’s here on the same page of the post.

Times Modern Black has some odd design details. Some of the lowercase letters—the “d” and “n” for example—have very narrow counters, but others, like the “o”, have very open counters.

VGC’s Times Bold Modified, in addition to the smattering of oddball swash characters, has figures that look like they are from a different typeface.

Albert-Jan Poolsays:

Mar 19th, 2013 4:26 pm

Just found out that I had another Scangraphic catalogue from 1992. It has Times Modern in it. The font number is 38809, the first digits 388 indicate the familiy and 09 the weight. 388 tells me that it was one of the last typefaces produced during the time I was at Scangraphic. Also, it is marked with an S, not with B which indicates that it was availble as Supertype (type sizes up to 90 mm cap height) and not as a Bodytype (up to 36 pt). For me, this indicates the following: Artwork digitized at URW with Ikarus, who may have had E&F do the work, conversion to Supertype Format by URW for Scangraphic, corrections at URW, specified by Scangraphic, widths and kerning by Scangraphic. From what was usual those days I now reconstruct the following: Between 1987 and 1991, many typesetting houses (such as TypoTausend, TypoBach, EInsatz, City-Satz, GST-Group, Context-Group, eventually also some of the TypeShops switched from Berthold to Scangraphic, because Berthold failed to successfully lauch their long promised CRT/Laser system, whilst Scangraphic had both systems running … Which meant that they would only order a Scangraphic system when we would be able to supply some of the typefaces they made their money with. In such cases, ‘artwork’ (basically a typeset alphabet) was delivered to us and then digitized as soon as possible. So this is what happened with Times Modern. It probably started its life in a catalogue showing various condensed versions of Riccone (maybe indicated as ‘Times Modern’ to lure the art-director’s eyes onto it). You probably know this from the old Photolettering catalogues. Then it got picked by Willy Fleckhaus, who eventually ordered some modifications to fit it with his ideas for the typography on the Suhrkamp book titles. The typesetting studio probably had an 2,5 Inch filmstrip font made according to that specification in order to ensure continous production quality. When the Scangraphic system was ordered, the Riccone Condensed alphabet was typeset, indicated as Times Modern and given to Scangraphic. Being a part of the Scangraphic library then, it later survived in the E&F library.

BTW. I think that Fleckhaus did not really contribute to the ‘design’ of Times Modern. In Germany it is quite common that art-directors state that they ‘create typography’ and do not distinguish between typography, logotypes or typefaces. So when someone tells that Fleckhaus ‘created the Suhrkamp typography’ someone else may easily understand from that that he designed the typeface. Sometimes this is on purpose (when talking to clients), sometimes this is accidental, like students that keep talking about kerning when they mean spacing. No matter how often you explain it. They use it because they think it is cool to do so :–)

So what you are suggesting, Albert, is that there must have been a Riccione available at one of the phototype manufacturers that Fleckhaus saw and for which he ordered a condensed version (or which was offered as that), sometime before 1970. Perhaps the change of name took place before that and Riccione was already offered under the name “Times Modern”. To trace the roots we can probably more or less disregard the digital era, unless Brendel or Scangraphic remembered from what phototype firm the model came from.

There was a Times Modern available at Berthold, shown in their Headlines E3 on p. 129, but it looks totally different. I also can’t find any similar face in their Staromat catalogs. What company could have provided the fonts or type setting for Twen in 1970? (At that time Twen was owned by Gruner & Jahr Hamburg, Fleckhaus himself lived somewhere in the Rheinland area.)

I tend to doubt this typeface/adaption was proprietary, so at some point someone probably offered it in one of their catalogs. Who has some more phototype specimens from the late 1960s?

Albert-Jan Poolsays:

Mar 19th, 2013 10:32 pm

Oops, I overlooked that Fleckhaus used this typeface before Brendel and Karow started working on Ikarus. I also checked Berthold Fototypes E1: no typeface like Times Modern as used by Fleckhaus. So my theory for today is that the first typefaces called Times Modern / Riccione have been created without digital means. Now it would be interesting to know when Brendel started his Type Shop business and wether there are type specimens from the Type Shop of that era which may shed some light on this. Another manufacturer which could have been involved is Letterphot. They produced a Staromat-like photo setter. Brendel does not mention Letterphot in his catalogue “faces” from around 1985–1990 though. Unfortunately I do not have any catalogues of the Type Shops or Letterphot. Who does?

The info about Brendel to be found on the net, e.g. at MyFonts suggest that he was active in the phototype typesetting business well before 1972, when he started Ikarus with Karow.

Before 1972, when type users demanded their type color to be “a little lighter or little darker”, Brendel, as the owner of over 28 type shops across Europe employing about six hundred people, could not meet their demands with the existing typefaces. Consequently Brendel developed a method to satisfy their needs.

Okay, maybe lighter/darker was not possible, but I still imagine it pretty easy to make modifications as in our case in phototype and produce a custom film strip or disk.

One of those weird documents by Stiehl you never really want to click accuses Brendel of having ripped off Times New Roman under the name Riccione. I also found a listing in Reichardt’s data, so I think it’s safe to assume that at least Riccione originates at Brendel, just no idea when and whether it’s really the direct predecessor to Times Modern. Checking Letterphot is a good idea, alas I have no material about them.

Albert-Jan Poolsays:

Mar 21st, 2013 12:34 pm

The story of ‘a little lighter or darker’ on MyFonts remains vague on what really happened I think. ‘A little lighter or darker’ is probably what Brendels customers asked for around 1970, and it must have been questions like this (next to wider, narrower, tighter, brighter, rounder, shaded, you name it) why, presumably after having started and running several Type Shops with opto-mechanical phototypesetting equipment for some time, Walter Brendel started to think of approaching the problems of typesetting and type design with the help of a programmer. Together with Peter Karow he developed the idea of storing typefaces in an outline format that would be digitizable from artwork, editable, scalable and modifiable, which finally resulted in the invention of the Ikarus Format (the other digital formats from those days simply failed one or more of these points). They envisioned that through digitizing and interpolation it would become easily possible to offer a large range of weights for a typeface family. The Type Shop families, who are now available on MyFonts still show convincingly that Walter Brendel had managed to realize such families. Most of them have 7 weights. Not all of them are what we would call ‘state of the art’ from a designers point of view, but compared with Linotype traditionally having 2 and ITC having 4 weights as a standard range, this was quite a remarkable achievement those days. It was only in the late 1980ties that Stempel started to redesign their families like Schneidler Mediäval and Janson Text and create ranges with 5 weights. Also Berthold usually stuck with 4 weights in those days.

I now realize this is getting a longer story which is a bit off-topic here, but I hope that it is still interesting and may eventually lead to answering the questions about who actually designed Times Modern / Riccione and how the first years of the Type Shops and their typeface library have looked like.

Back to subject: Fleckhaus seems to have started the Suhrkamp design range in 1971. My question is now: Did he use Times Modern / Riccione from the very beginning, do we have Suhrkamp covers which actually document this usage? It could be of help to more accurately indicate the Date of Birth of this so intruiguing typeface.

Have you tried asking Elsner+Flake? Since the reason for taking the font down was due to a complaint related to the name, there is the possibility that it can be licensed under a different name.

Sebastien Lordezsays:

Oct 21st, 2014 10:25 pm

Hello Florian. I’m gonna do this right now! I drop a line here as soon as I get the answer.

Andreassays:

Apr 17th, 2015 12:13 am

Hi Sebastien, I’m really curious to know if you got an answer from Elsner+Flake? ’Cause I think Times Modern is genius work and I’ve been looking for it everywhere — really everywhere! But i just can’t find it. So please let me know.

Richard W. Jonessays:

May 27th, 2015 11:28 pm

I’ve just stumbled across this blog post. Most interesting. I’ve dug out something I wrote on comp.fonts way back in 2002 about The Times newspaper’s move from Gunnlaugur Briem’s Times Millennium to Times Classic.

“Haven’t seen this discussed anywhere, not even the web, but as of last Monday (11th February), The Times newspaper of London has started using a new typeface, replacing their existing Times Millennium designed by Gunnlauger S. E. Briem in 1990, unless it happens to be a revision of the existing design. Nothing has been reported anywhere on this change.”

"An article appeared in the Media section of last Friday’s Times (15th February) on this subject. It will remain at the link below until Thursday 21st February, after which it will then be archived and a charge levied by Mr Murdoch for your right to read it.”

Many years ago the most popular TV programme on Sunday nights was What’s My Line? in which the panel had to guess a person’s occupation after he had tried to mime his job.
I doubt that they would have guessed what Dave Farey or Richard Dawson do for a living. Farey is a letter repairer and Dawson a digital punch cutter — and if that leaves you none the wiser, they are the typographers who designed Times Classic, the new typeface introduced this week by The Times.

Times New Roman, designed by Stanley Morison in 1932 and used by The Times for 40 years, is still the most widely used typeface in the world. Its genes continued in Times Europa, partially introduced in 1972.

Times Millennium, a digitised typeface introduced in 1991, was the first nod in the direction of the new methods of newspaper production. It was drawn on an Apple Mac computer and designed specifically for the new technology of the electronic era.

Classic is designed to meet the latest production system in which all the pages are designed and set by computer.

Typography is perhaps the most arcane of newspaper arts. I doubt that most journalists or readers could name the typeface used in their newspapers. But readers certainly notice if they find the paper difficult to read. One tribute to the craftsmanship of Farey and Dawson was that few readers even noticed the changed typeface used throughout The Times on Monday. Yet it is the result of two years of dedicated work in which Farey, using tracing paper, drew 1,200 letters which were then digitised by Dawson.

The reason is that a new typeface requires 120 letters per face — 26 each in capitals and lower case; plus all those @, *, & and £ signs set around a keyboard — and there are ten faces (bold, light, italic and so on in both caps and lower case). The aim was to improve legibility, retain a familiar appearance for readers as well as “Britishness” in the shapes of the characters, and still pack in the words required of a broadsheet.

The main effect of Classic, if we have to be technical, is that it reduces the x-height of lower case letters so that the eye is not distracted by lines above or below them and the shapes of the serifs are flatter. Readers scan letters across the top half of a line of text, says Farey, and recognise words without having to read them. The eye scans Classic more comfortably.

The differences between Millennium and Classic are demonstrated in the word “weathering” or the letter ‘a’ (see illustrations). In Classic, the ‘W’ is uncrossed, the crossbar on the ‘e’ is lower and more legible, the teardrop in the ‘a’ is a different shape, the ‘t’ has a flatter cross and the top is square, the dot on the ‘i’ is circular, and the bottom bowl of the ‘g’ is a wider teardrop and more strongly defined. The ‘h’, ‘r’, ‘i’ and ‘n’ each have shallower angles on serifs. Combinations of letters as ‘f’ and ‘i’, and ‘f’ and ‘t’, don’t
clash.

Typographers also note the overall colour of a newspaper page — the relationship of black to white. The overall effect of Classic is that the type is bolder and darker but with more space within and without the letters. The font is now 8.7 on 9 point rather than the 8.25 on 9 point of Millennium. Given the compression demanded of newspaper headlines, Classic sets very well in narrow measures (see the contrast between the before and after two-column front page leads).

David Driver, the head of design at The Times, and David Wadmore, his deputy, who initiated the redesign, are delighted with the result. Classic, says Driver, has more character and its style is elegant.

Richard W. Jonessays:

May 27th, 2015 11:28 pm

It’s a real shame that Briem’s Times Millennium isn’t available, as it was a work of art in itself.